Reg Review Sony Ericsson's K700i is its new midrange flagship, the successor to the T68, the phone "which saved Ericsson". It's also the second non-smartphone I've used in recent months that I've been very reluctant to return. Despite one very serious flaw, Sony Ericsson users will be at home with this new model.

Family history

When Ericsson launched the T68 late in 2001 the handset division was in the middle of a shotgun wedding to Sony's phone business. Ericsson was generally thought to have lost the plot, with market share in free fall. Perception isn't necessarily true, but the company had hitched its brand to wide, blocky antennae just as external antennae were going out of style. (It's very rare indeed to find a phone, even a CDMA phone, with an external aerial these days). The T68 truly astonished the competition: here was a colour phone with an internal antenna, Bluetooth and GPRS, POP3 email, and terrific battery life. It was the first to be skinnable, too, with Ericsson publishing an open format that spawned thousands of home made themes. The T68i is still popular today, although given the breakneck pace of competition, the color screen soon looked washed-out, and speed and radio reception were never its strong points. (It was one of the first to introduce the Windows hourglass to phones). Still, only minor speed and cosmetic upgrades were necessary in successors such as the popular T610. And the K700 doesn't offer anything revolutionary either, although it's better in almost every department.

On display

The K700i may sell itself on the basis of its screen alone, which is the sharpest we've seen in a phone of this class. Sony Ericsson's designers have taken advantage of the colour capabilities to showcase some pointless, but very attractive eye candy, such as icons which zoom when selected and animated wallpaper. (Yes, now you really can have phone that looks like there's a fly trapped inside it.) Theme designers are already taking advantage of this. Not all the applications make use of the 176x220 pin sharp screen, however. The Calendar could be a clear champion, but the grids used for day and week views are the same size as its predecessors, effectively wasting all that new screen real estate . That resolution is the same as Nokia's Series 60, although this is a much smaller screen than you'll find in the 6600, and the small size of the phone is again one of its selling points. And at 93g, so is the weight.

The other selling point of the K700i is its lightening-fast access to WAP sites. Sony Ericsson has built-in Java, and much to our surprise we found we could access AT&T Wireless' home deck in less time than the T68 would take to open the address book. Without the dreaded wait, we did find going online to look something up, or browse the downloads, much more appealing. To the non-technical users it will appear to have blurred the boundary between what's "in the phone" and what's an online service, which is just as it should be, and carriers will be particularly pleased.

Another surprise was the quality and clarity of the built-in FM radio. This is now a fairly common sight on public transport in Europe, and your reviewer will very much miss this feature. All phones should have a radio: it's a proven media that works. The power consumption of the radio is almost negligible.

Radio reception marked another improvement over previous generations, although a little weaker than larger smartphones, which of course have larger internal antennae. US users on the AT&T and Cingular networks should note that they won't be able to take advantage of the vastly better reception on the 850Mhz band, and should wait for a K700 version that does.

Ergonomics and design

The human interface is identical to older models, with the Return key and the cancel ('c') key complimented by a five way joystick. Users coming from Nokia phones will find the 'c' infuriating. It serves just two purposes: backspacing over text input, and deleting entries from your phone book when you don't want it to. The 'c' on Nokia's Navikey interface performs the same function as the Ericsson return key, so newcomers will be pressing it more often than they should. There's little justification for a dedicated delete button which is used so infrequently, but which can cause users so much trouble. The graphical user interface has been spruced up and the high pixel density allows Sony Ericsson to use a twelve icon deck, rather than the familiar nine in older models. Each one of these can be activated by a corresponding keypad shortcut.

The K700i is sold, rather oversold in fact, on the virtues of its built-in camera. The blurb suggests that it's as much a camera as a phone, and the sleek hardware design consciously imitates a digital camera. In truth, however, this is a standard VGA with a few tricks up its sleeve. It allows video clips to be taken, can stitch three photos together into a 1.2MP panorama, and features an LED light. In practice, while the camera was one of the better VGA models in daylight, night mode performance fell far below rivals, with a grainy speckled effect ruining almost every picture. The LED doesn't make an appreciable difference here.

The K700i has over 40MB of RAM free to the users, which makes it a capable media phone, and an MP3 player is included. However with no removable storage, users must rely on Bluetooth or Infra Red to beam over songs, as there's no USB cable in the package we reviewed. Both are extremely slow.

The K700i has two aspects of the case design we saw with the P900: a very sturdy feel, and the now obligatory silly flap. The P900 featured a rubber door over the headphone socket, which was very hard to remove (after a few weeks, your reporter's resembles a well chewed pup's toy). With the K700i, the charging port is covered by a rubber hinge, which again, is far harder to open than it should be.

Now to the phone's major drawback: power consumption. Sony Ericsson claims that the phone can be used for 8 hours of talk time and 300 hours of standby time, but to put it politely, the handset we used came no where near these figures. Unlike the T68, this isn't a phone you want to separate from a charger for very long. We regularly got two days use out of it, sometimes less, and it chewed through the battery alarmingly when Bluetooth was turned on. The culprit, it appears, is the screen. Although the phone aggressively uses power saving time-outs (and annoyingly won't display the time, missed calls or new messages by default) the screen simply eats the battery far too quickly.

The verdict

A worthy alternative to a smartphone? Well, to be honest, unless you're addicted to being online, or checking the web every few minutes, the trade off in size and weight isn't so compelling. (Price is no longer an issue, thanks to Nokia's fire sale current discounting policy: a 6600 can be picked up for nothing, now).

The strongest reason for going to a smartphone is the very rich selection of games you can find on Series 60 phones. But as music devices they're not quite there: the Sendo being the best on offer. As offline readers, they're not quite there either, with the lack of a decent web/feed reader to siphon up favorites sites for the morning commute. GPS would be nice, too. All of which lends weight to former Symbian boss Colly Myer's prediction that smartphones will only come into their own once phones have to cope with the heavy lifting required by 3G, or VoIP, or IPv6.

If Sony Ericsson can alleviate the power consumption, this is a little gem we recommend without reservation to existing SE users, and with only a few caveats to Nokia users. ®

Related reviews

Sendo X: phone meets PDA, MP3 player, light sabre
Nokia 6820 messaging phone
Siemens SX1 smartphone
Nokia 6600